How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken: Essays

Description

Whether he's on Broadway or at the movies, considering a new bestseller or revisiting a literary classic, Daniel Mendelsohn's judgments over the past fifteen years have provoked and dazzled with their deep erudition, disarming emotionality, and tart wit. Now, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken demonstrates why he is considered one of our greatest critics. Writing with a lively intelligence and arresting originality, he brings his distinctive combination of scholarly rigor and conversational ease to bear across eras, cultures, and genres, from Roman games to video games.

Daniel Mendelsohn was born in Long Island and educated at the University of Virginia and at Princeton. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books as well as the New York Times Magazine and the New York Times Book Review, and is contributing editor at Travel + Leisure. His previous books include the memoir The Elusive Embrace, a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year, and the international best seller 'The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million', which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Prix Medicis, and many other honours. He teaches at Bard College.

"An elegant collection of essays... Mendelsohn reveals intellectual breadth in his ability to draw on his training as a classicist to look at contemporary culture... These essays richly repay the time readers spend in their company." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Brilliant... Masterful... Wise, funny... A wonderful collection." -- Time Out New York "Mendelsohn takes on contemporary culture with humor and incisive analysis." -- The New York Sun